Lex Fridman: uncertainty

Transcript context

…No, that we can logically follow because if you don’t have free will, so if you’re in a universe that has no time, universe is deterministic. If it’s deterministic, then you have no free will. I think the space of how much we don’t know is so vast that saying the universe is deterministic and from that jumping into there’s no free will is just too difficult of a leap. No, I logically follow. No, no, I don’t disagree. It’s deep and it’s important. All I’m saying, and it’s actually different to what I’ve said before, is that if you don’t require platonistic mathematics and accepts that non-determinism is how the universe looks and that gives us our creativity and the way the universe is getting novelty, it’s really deeply important in assembly theory because assembly theory starts to actually give you a mechanism where you go from boring time, which is basically initial conditions specify everything, to a mismatch in creative time. And I hope we’ll do experiments. I would love to do an experiment that prove that time is fundamental and the universe is generating novelty. I don’t know all the features of that experiment yet, but by having these conversations openly and getting people to think about the problems in a new way, better people, more intelligent people with good mathematical backgrounds can say, “Oh, hey, I’ve got an idea. I would love to do an experiment that shows that the universe is too big for itself going forward in time.” And this is why I really hate the idea of the Boltzmann brain. The Boltzmann brain makes me super, like everyone’s having a free lunch. It’s like saying, “Let’s break all the laws of physics.” So a Boltzmann brain is this idea that in a long enough universe, a brain will just emerge in the universe as conscious. And that neglects the causal chain of evolution that required to produce that brain. And this is where the computational argument really falls down because a computationalist could say,” I can calculate probability of a Boltzmann brain.” And they’ll give you a probability. But I can calculate probability of a Boltzmann brain. Zero.…

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